Baby steps; the first step is to use component manufacturers in Taiwan.

Easily done, after all many outsource to mainland China so volume won't be a problem.
Next?

Legality has left the building. It's "might makes right" just like in China and in the USSR back in the day.
Papers please.

The NSA overreached and the consequence is that its job will become more and more difficult going forward

As it should.
They want to play at being toy soldiers? Then get rid of the pissing in pockets network of expensive external contractors and pay them as soldiers. No more Hollywood set designers to fit out an operations room to an Exec's SF dreams. On military salaries and not being able to apply titles like VP of whatever it's less likely to attract the corrupt who created the sprawling web it currently is.

Ever notice the name of the "Patriot Act" and what it said to the US people post 9/11 by challenging it without even having a chance to read it as it was rushed through with a sense of artificial panic? Pretty fucking blatant - vote against it and you are not a patriot. The name and tactics were a low, underhanded, and most definitely "unpatriotic" act of defecting on the flag and wrapping it up, then demanding respect for the flag despite what it contained. Yes it would be nice if somebody was strong enough to call it the way it was, but the blame really lies with the bully that defecated on the flag more than the weaklings that let him get away with it.

Also, most of the American exports are not commodity items that can be replaced

Keep on telling yourself that until you notice that those 5 axis milling machines have "made in China" plates on them.

There's a lot of OEM bundling of it which still counts as a sale, and also makes it a default option for continuing sales.

Web front end on existing infrastructure - a few hundred bucks per year.
Someone like Dr Karl (http://www.abc.net.au/science/drkarl/) - priceless, but you've still got to pay a salary, and most likely not just for one person.

In those instances, why bother with homoeopathy? Why not go straight to sugar pills/water?

And THAT is the problem with his claims.

It isn't important whether reading YOUR horoscope makes YOU "feel" better about YOURSELF.

It's whether reading someone else's AND BELIEVING IT IS YOURS makes you "feel" better about yourself.

So ..... do we foster an anti-science belief system because some people can self-invoke the placebo effect? Or do point out that it is nothing more than the placebo effect?

There's probably an update to fix most of those things since they don't seem to have been observed much by others. The "white shirt" thing makes me wonder if you are just taking the piss instead discussing something real - I have not observed such a thing even in full subtropical sunlight (where an LCD is useless - bring on the eink phone so I don't have to go into the shade just to see the virtual button to answer a call).
However the PDF thing could be a real issue since some require a ridiculous amount of processing power to render and some are even encapsulated bitmaps that look like crap at anything other than native resolution - epub, mobi etc are formats that ereaders are better at rendering.
Also the size of most of them is designed for "light paperback reading" since you can't fit an A4 sized journal article on the things without being too small or losing formatting. The larger devices like the Boox M92/96 are for that sort of thing and can rotate sideways, zoom to a box defined by two points etc and have enough CPU grunt to handle a lot of badly formatted PDF files

but sometimes there is such a thing as too much information

Then you just don't activate the dictionary function on the thing you don't care about.

They *could* get the definition instantaneously through a link and move on, but is that actually learning?

If you clicked on "learning" to get a definition you would find that is is :) For example, I used to read a bit of stuff by Morris West on paper and I did need to keep a paper dictionary handy, and I did learn things as a consequence.
Sadly there's too much flashing and moving shit on the typical web page for e-ink web browsers to be a seamless experience so the bit about forking off onto the net in the middle of a book is currently moot - browsing is a relatively clunky exercise requiring effort and not a simple distraction. There's offline wikipedia applications for ereaders to make it less painful.

TFA claims the opposite. But since they're trying to sell something ... of course they would.

When team members had overlapping lunch breaks and talked to each other, their stress was lower (as measured by tone of voice), job turnover was lower, and they completed their calls faster.

So the bank made a management change and tested it over several months -- it gave half the teams breaks at the same time and compared the results. It found the turnover rate fell from 40 percent to 12 percent, and the more cohesive teams completed their calls 23 percent more quickly -- which is "worth tens of millions of dollars" to Bank of America, Waber says.

Now, to me that that reads more like BoA's PRIMARY communication channels were fucked. So the employees were attempting to share information using the INFORMAL "lunch break" channel.

So BoA, in effect, makes the informal channel MANDATORY.

It isn't about swapping your ham and cheese for Alice's peanut butter and jelly. Or trading "dumbest question this morning".

It's about Alice ... on smoke break with Bob ... learning that X was changed and they weren't told ... and sharing that info with the Chuck at lunch ... who shares it with Danny ...

I was describing the model for "rock stars" and their managers.

You are describing the model that regular techs have. I'd be willing to bet that your friend gets his jobs because someone he's worked with in the past recommends him by name.

NOT because someone who's never worked with him, is claiming that this new project is PERFECT for him.

It is about the focus. For techs, the focus is on getting the talent for the project.

For "rock stars" the focus is on pitching the project to the talent.

Guys when you send your resume in and they demand it be in an editable form such as MS Word be prepared to deal with the consequences of a bit of resume padding or stripping by people that do not quite understand what the words in the resume mean or who have a more sinister agenda.
I went to one interview and found that a few years of relevant experience was cut and pasted from my resume onto someone else's applying for the same job via the same agency. I'd brought copies of my resume to hand out at the interview and the interviewers got a bit of a shock comparing it to the ones they had been supplied with. They didn't use that recruiter again.

That's what I was thinking. Isn't this BACKWARDS?

The A-list actors don't have agents looking for jobs for them. They have agents filtering out the crap.

The same thing with the top name bands and singers. Their agents filter out the crap. NOT dig around looking for any dive bar that will give them a gig.

How many CTO's/CIO's out there do you think are asking for whomever built Slashdot beta by name?

In my experience you get brought in, by name, when someone you've worked with in the past recommends you by name.

I think you're right. AND a big part of it INITIALLY is the presence of natural resources. Villages - towns - cities - they all need water and food. So they start where those are available.

The weird part of TFA is how exact their numbers are.

"15 percent"

"about 83 percent"

I suspect that a LOT of averaging went on there. And more than a little bit of "toss out the 'data scatter'". Which gives them the "mathematical rule".

And what about suburbs? Do the poor people live further from the city center because they cannot afford to live there? Or do the wealthier citizens live in the suburbs because they can afford larger villas?